Le weekend est arrivé (et pas un moment trop bientôt)

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Beaus parleurs et belles parleuses,

I have completed my first week at l'Alliance Française, in a 12-week intensive course by which I hope to increase my foreign-language blathering potential to nearly 65% of my English-language blathering proficiency. Those of you who know me must realize, with some degree of sympathy if not outright pity, how difficult it is for me to run my mouth off as usual with a vocabulary limited to words that when strung together form grammatically incorrect and badly pronounced phrases that can only help me find toilets and request pastries. One might better describe what I do here as "limping" or "stumbling" my mouth off. (OK, granted: It would be disingenuous of me to maintain that asking for bathrooms and food is all that I'm capable of; my need for a local bank account and renter's insurance has given me a large French vocabulary for matters of finance and fidelity. So go ahead, ask me anything you want to know en français about toilet locations, pastries, and the French Building Federation's Actuarial Reference Index.)

I just returned home and proceeded to diddle away a good number of minutes trying to come up with a less-than-pathetic joke along the lines of how "my first week just flew by and boy are my arms tired," but in fact it didn't fly by at all, and my whole being is tired.

Knowing my own limitations regarding pre-noon punctuality, I had registered for the afternoon program at l'Alliance, but my first week had to be the mornings, which has meant getting caffeined and croissanted bright and early and wedged into a Metro car at rush hour to arrive on time. I figured just the novelty of it all (and knowing its impermanence) would make it an easy routine, but I hadn't expected the all-body-cell exhaustion that comes from an immersion in a foreign language. Until it starts to flow naturally and one's comprehension improves, the energy it takes to be constantly, hastily calculating the meaning of everything said or heard makes it imaginable that mental exhaustion could actually be fatal. By only the third morning I stumbled towards the Metro a half-hour late for class and struggled to decide between a) having a much-needed café crème and b) not having one and therefore not needing to remember how to ask for one.

I was back on schedule Wednesday, but today it seems incredible that I've only been in school for one week. The first day seems to me to have been months ago now, and I've found myself stumbling during mundane interactions in shops and on the street.

Yesterday, for example, I went to the bank to deposit my rent into the landlord's account. I made a mistake filling out the deposit slip and after tearing it up I looked around for a wastebasket and found none, but on the front of all the lobby's little podia with the slips and pen stands were flap-doored slots. One of these seemed like the logical place to toss one's garbage, but when I pushed open the flap there really wasn't much more than a quarter-inch space to stuff my little scraps, and in trying I lost my hold on most of them, and they fell to the floor in a little confetti-like flurry. Juggling a knapsack and my checkbook and reading glasses and the corrected deposit slip made it hard to pick up my mess, and after transferring all that I was carrying to one hand I tried to pick up the torn paper scraps from the lobby floor with the other, but they were more than one handful; each time I would gather a respectable amount of scraps off the floor, I dropped half those I was already holding.

I decided to clean up in stages, and started to feed the tidbits of paper into the little slot, and then I noticed the little symbol of an envelope next to the slot's flap and realized that this was not a garbage receptacle at all, but a place to leave deposits if you didn't need a teller's services, and just as I realized that this was the reason the slot was so narrow, I looked up and saw that the line for the teller had grown and I was now being stared at through the hostilely squinting eyes of seven or eight bank customers.

Now this would be embarrassing enough if I did this at a bank branch in San Francisco, but my mortification was amplified by the fact that I suddenly lost all memory of every French word I had ever learned in my life. It wasn't just that I couldn't make a self-deprecating joke, or say "Oh la, ceci n'est pas la poubelle! Voyez-vous où on met des poubelles là?" -- I couldn't say anything. And when I realized that, I then realized I couldn't remember how to speak English, either. And then I had to stand in line with all these glaring people wondering what French words they were thinking of me and gather my thoughts (and recover my French) so I could explain to the teller that I wanted to deposit money into an account that was not my own.

I did not physically black out, but an hour later in the safety of my living room I looked in my wallet to find a receipt that confirmed that I indeed had conducted the business at hand. I honestly have no recollection of the transaction.

So now it's le weekend and Sunday is market day on Blvd. Richard Lenoir near Place de la Bastille. I went there last week but realized that despite the abundance and variety of all the merchants' appealing offerings, I would need considerably better French and a lesson in market banter, etiquette, and procedure to be able to shop there. Fortuitously, much of this week's course at l'Alliance used marketing savoir-faire as the basis for the language lessons being taught.

I have learned how one negotiates for foodstuffs from Paris's dizzying array of épiceries, boulangeries, poissoneries, pâtisseries, fromageries, charcuteries, confiseries, and boucheries; the communication of desired ripeness and readiness for consumption; to specify the target date of its edibility; and the terminology of its packaging, its measurements, and its level of piquance. I have learned (although forgotten) the difference between the batters for savory and sweet crèpes in Brittany and how because crèpes here use the same batter for both, one would be a fool to eat a crèpe in Paris and believe he had really eaten a crèpe; and I've learned the myriad ways that French merchants can tell you they don't have exactly what you want but might recommend something you don't know you want but that you actually want more than what you asked for.

I've yet to put this potentially powerful knowledge to work, and I am still not sure I am up to it after my first day's outing to the marché des fruits et légumes near my apartment -- a traumatizing experience that nearly resulted in my death from dehydration due to over-perspiring and a prolonged case of Bare Larder Syndrome after making a hasty retreat from the store with but three items (in the wrong quantity) from my substantially longer list of intended purchases.

It was one of the many greengrocers in Paris where one doesn't choose one's own produce, but rather tells the proprietor his or her choices (wielding the above-mentioned powers of description) and leaves the actual selection to the professional. Personally, I found negotiating for my insurance policy easier, and since that fateful day I have been stopping for vegetables in the safe haven of the grocer who lets his customers make their own decidedly unprofessional selections and bring them to the register for payment.

Perhaps when next you hear from me I will have earned the right to report to you on the joys of not just eating in France, not just cooking in France, but actually describing a food item and taking home a very close approximation of what I believed I was requesting. I make no promises, but I believe after a bit of rest, I might be able summon up enough French to say, "Comme Dieu est mon témoin, je n'aurai plus jamais le ventre creux!"

Mais je la considérerai demain. (Après tout, demain est un autre jour...)

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Day 8: The Louvre

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Voyeurs et voyeuses,

Pour vous, un nouveau video:



Need I say more? I think not.

Oh, the humanity!!

OK, so that's not completely fair. Or at least not to the Louvre, even if it does seem to sum up what a lot of the people who come to the museum think is its only attraction. The thing is, you have to pass by many great works -- it's a hefty enough walk to work off two pains au chocolat and half a baguette well-slathered with a nicely ripened raw-milk Coulommiers -- and any dozens of incredible paintings along the way could make you forget that the Louvre even has the Mona Lisa.

Perhaps your eye would be caught by Salviate's "L'Incrédulité de St. Thomas" (detail, above) in which the famed doubter holds out his hands in a gesture that states to the painting's other characters in no uncertain terms, "Talk to the stigmata!"

Two paintings of the diminutive David (by Bartolomeo Manfredi and Guido Reni) catch the young lad at candid moments following his triumph over Mr. Big. These two paintings will surprise anyone who, without imagination to match that of Italian Renaissance painters, never considered Goliath's slayer such a pretty boy, in one portrait decked out with a frippy plume in his capello and an "ain't I the cock of the walk" air about him. To all you fans of St. Sebastian back in San Francisco, I think you should change heroes. This kid's got the looks and the attitude, along with being the underdog who came out a winner. And St. Subby was way too busy bleeding from his arrow wounds to give sufficient thought to his haberdashery. He probably didn't even know not to wear a white hat feather after labor day.

This was in no way meant to be an art lecture, and to describe my four hours in an art museum would require me to bore you to certain death -- not my intention when I began this entry. Suffice it to say that there is time and space to ponder and/or admire nearly anything in the Louvre except for the Mona Lisa, which is protected from proper viewing and contemplation by a roped partition, protective plexiglass, and crowds, crowds, crowds, crowds, crowds. The feeling one gets entering the room where Ms. Mona hangs is similar to a common sentiment when taking a seat in the upper tier of an 80,000-person sports arena to see a popular rock group along with 79,999 other fans, all of whom are shrieking so loudly you can't hear the music; it's great to say you saw them live, but if you had really wanted to enjoy the music you could have stayed home and popped their CD in the stereo. You can go to the Louvre and say you saw the Mona Lisa, too, but if you want to really look at her, you'll see more detail and have more time to enjoy it if you open a high-quality art book.

À demain (ou après)...

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A Cheap French Tart Offers Comfort and Joy

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Above: Tarte Tatin a la Tomate. Recipe (with caveats) available in the Comments section for this post.

Gourmets et Gourmettes,

I held off as long as I could (not wanting to make it a habit what with rising prices and the falling dollar), but a morning anxiety attack that made it extremely difficult to turn off a voice in my head that kept screaming, "What the fuck were you thinking, moving to France?!" had me running around the corner to Les Philosophes to have a slice of their tarte tatin à la tomate to calm myself down.

And it worked, or it did for as long as it took to savor the tart and finish off the small carafe of vin rouge I had ordered to keep the voice occupied. I figured that if it was well fed and perhaps a little drunk it would fall asleep, or at least slur its words a bit so its message to me would be as hard for me to understand as French; I could then just shrug my shoulders and tell it "Je ne comprends pas," or a new phrase I have been practicing, "Si vous me parlez comme si je fusse un imbécile, très clair et lentement, peut-être que je vous comprendrais mieux." I don't even know if that's really how one asks to be spoken to as an idiot, but my hope (in this case at least) was that the voice would become as impatient with me as a Parisian shopkeeper and turn its attentions to another customer with better communication skills.

Everyone I know in the States has heard me go on at length about Les Philosophes' tomato tart. It's the first thing I ever ate in France, years ago, and it remains one of the great food sensations on earth. Many of you have visited Paris and on my recommendation have gone to Les Philosophes and ordered it and agreed with my assessment of it, and some of you with pitifully little self control have returned more than once during short Parisian vacations to eat more than your human share of it. (I will not name you on such public pages; you know who you are.)

I don't know if sensations of pleasure are dealt with by the same parts of the brain as pain, but sort of like a mother who when birthing her second baby may comment that had she remembered her first labor little Bobby would be an only child, I honestly didn't remember how good this tart was. If I had, I would have had it many more times than I have, and when I arrived last Tuesday I would have had the taxi drop me right in front of a curbside table and shouted out my order to the waiter before I'd even pulled my bags from the car.

I have tried to make the tart at home with little success, even after getting the recipe from Les Philosophes' Web site. It's an incredibly time-consuming and idiotic procedure that involves blanching, peeling, and seeding an absurd number of tomatoes, endangering anyone who comes into your kitchen by searing them (the tomatoes) with a caramel of hot oil and sugar, and then draining the result for longer than it takes to drive from San Francisco to Los Angeles and back.

The recipe had disappeared from the site shortly after I discovered it there (I assumed following advice from counsel), but this morning when I went online to see if I needed to sell any of my plasma to afford to lunch there, I noticed that Les Philosophes' Web site is completely redesigned and that the recipe has been re-posted. The price is higher yet affordable (9€ for a generous slice, including some nice greens in a simple vinaigrette), but more interesting to me is that L.P.'s food is not the first thing they've posted amongst their Web site's offerings. In a higher-priority position is a link to "Les Toilettes" and an invitation to "Come visit the philosophers' toilets!" with a photo-gallery tour of their spiffy restroom. (One is almost tempted to recommend it to Republican congressmen as a venue for practicing their toe-tapping techniques, save for the fact that it would be a shame to get the place dirty.)

Also before the food is mentioned, the site offers a roster of the people who work there. After spending hours blanching tomatoes in an attempt to replicate just one of their tarts, I often wondered how on earth Les Philosophes could offer a house specialty that to prepare would require 20 or 30 times the number of tomatoes to be plunged daily into scalding water, and today I noticed in their staff listing that three people there hold the title of plongeur. Before I looked up the word to find that a plongeur is actually a dishwasher, I was thinking I had solved the tomato-blanching mystery. The "philosophers' toilets" are way too swank to make one think they'd require so many of the other possible type of plongeur. Now that my French vocabulary has increased by one more word, I am back to Square One, with no idea how the tarts are produced.

When my French improves and I no longer need to be spoken to as if I were an idiot, I am determined to get to the bottom of this.

Bon appétit...

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NOTE: Here is the link to Les Philosophes. The link offers Web pages for a number of restaurants. L.P.'s is accessed through the logo fftp:// at the top of the page.

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8 comments:

Paul Karasik said...

Smarty,

I still don't have much of an idea of what this tarte IS. At least take a discreet photo, s'il vous plait.

-p.

Wednesday, 19 September, 2007

Smartypants said...

You mean I should go back there with a camera and order it again?

Oh, all right, since you insist.

Wednesday, 19 September, 2007

Regine Aubergine said...

Yes, pictures please. Also a copy of the recipe. We have had tons of tomatoes and Van has been blanching away to peel the skins and make various salsas. Though tomatoe season is almost done, another recipe would be great. I can't seem to find it on the link that you provided. Enjoy!

Kerry

Wednesday, 19 September, 2007

Shyamala said...

I like how the recipe starts, with a touch of resignation: Faites bouillir une grande quantite d'eau...

Wednesday, 19 September, 2007

Smartypants said...

I will post the recipe and its translation, but ONLY with with the agreement that you will send me an affadvit within 24 hours of your reading this, and before any preheating of any ovens or fairing of any eau to bouille, worded as follows:

"I, the undersigned, understand that if I undertake to attempt this feat at home I do so at my own risk and the risk of any hapless tomatoes unfortunate enough to have fallen into my shopping cart and hence sacrificed in the process.

Lu et apprové, X_____________________________

That agreed, you need to know that a) I have tried this three times without success, and b) even knowing what this looks and tastes like the recipe makes no sense, especially the thing about the sauce at the end. If I were a paranoid person, I'd dare to say the whole recipe is a cruel joke by a disturbed and secretive chef.

That said, allons-y:

20 tomates fraîches
1/2 botte de sauge
1/2 botte de basilic
1/2 botte de romarin
500g de sucre
1/4 litre de huile d'olive
pâte brisée

Faites bouillir une grande quantité d'eau. En même temps effectuez une incision sur le sommet des tomates et ôtez-y les opercules.

Ebouillantez les tomates et rafraîchissez-les afin de les monder(enlever la peau). Coupez-les en deux et laissez-les égoutter.

Réalisez un caramel avec le sucre et l'huile d'olive, ensuite incorporez-y les tomates et les herbes ciselées.

Laissez réduire au four à 180° pendant 30 minutes, puis mettez le tout dans un endroit frais et réservez 12h pour un égouttage complet.

Tassez les tomates dans un moule à génoise beurré et couvrir le tout avec la pâte brisée piquée à la sauge.

Mettez au four pendant 20 minutes à 180°. Laissez refroidir puis démoulez en retournant.

Servez avec le jus d'égouttage comme sauce d'accompagnement.

TRANSLATION (and I'm sure some French-talking Smartypantalon will be quick to correct my errors):

20 fresh tomatoes
1/2 a bunch of sage
1/2 a bunch of basil
1/2 a bunch of rosemary
500g of sugar
1/4 liter of olive oil
Pie pastry dough

Bring a large quantity of water to a boil. Meanwhile make an incision on the top of the tomatoes and remove the stem caps.

Blanch the tomatoes in the boiling water, then cold water, and remove the skins. Cut them in half and let them drain.

Create a caramel with the sugar and olive oil, then add to it the tomatoes and chopped herbs.

Let the mixture reduce in a 350° oven for 30 minutes, then put it the whole thing in a cool place and let drain completely for 12 hours.

Pack the tomatoes into a buttered cake pan and cover with the pastry dough pricked with sage.

Bake for 20 minutes at 350°. Let cool, and then invert the pan to unmold it.

Serve with the drained juice as a sauce to accompany it.

Wednesday, 19 September, 2007

Anonymous said...

Oh Joel, how I love to read what you write and I even hear it in your voice!! You always make me laugh.
Lisa and I will attempt the tart and get back to you.
Love
Jenn

Thursday, 20 September, 2007

Smartypants said...

Voilà! A photo has been added to the blog entry, as requested.

Monday, 24 September, 2007

slippery said...

Drool!!!

Monday, 24 September, 2007

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Dans les Pas de Mme. Sévigné

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Bonnes Mesdames et Bons Messieurs,

I know I've been remiss in not reporting sooner, but it's been hard to fit in any writing what with settling in and all, so now I thought I'd post a little visual of my new neighborhood and apartment as well as a bit of news. The new version of iMovie is infuriating to work with (and I'm a crappy photographer) so forgive me for the quality; I simply lost patience with the entire endeavor.

As a note of explanation, this weekend the French are having what are called Les Journées Européenes du Patrimoine, ("European Heritage Days," sort of), during which hundreds of historical and cultural sites throughout France that are not normally open to the public or usually charge admission -- more than 700 venues in Paris alone -- shirk their fees or cloaks of privacy and admit the masses to view their glory. My neighborhood, Le Marais, is one of the oldest quartiers, having escaped Baron Haussmann's wrecking balls during the 19th century and Le Corbusier's ambitions of the 20th, so there are many of these historic sites within a few steps of where I live.

This video shows the following:

On the rue Vieilles-du-Temple, one block over from my apartment, is the magnificent Hôtel Amelot de Bisseuil, built in the late 1650s and perhaps most noted for having been the residence of Pierre Beaumarchais who wrote "The Marriage of Figaro" on which Mozart based his opera. Its original owner, Jean-Baptiste Amelot de Bisseuil, was a bit sun-obsessed, and there are images everywhere in the mansion's carvings and worn frescoes reflecting his solar passions. (You will note a couple of the surviving sundials of wrought iron protruding from the walls that cast shadows against the painted time scales.)

The Journées du Patrimoine's tours of the Hôtel led visitors through the two courtyards from its front entrance on rue Vieilles-du-Temple and out the back door on the next street over, the rue des Guillemites where I live. Just to give you some idea of where I live you will see in the video the bright red door of the Hôtel Amelot's rear exitway, after which the camera turns around to show my house, built during the same period of the 17th century. (It's the one with the blue-green door to the right of the graffito of an A that's been spray-painted in the more contemporary style. I've marked my dining room window to try to give you all an idea of how it all fits together. I hope it's at least vaguely successful.)

The rest of the video gives a complete tour of my swanky Marais apartment (which I did not tidy up before filming, sorry) with its two courtyard views, then some random photos and clips from my meanderings yesterday in the 'hood, along the rue des Rosiers and, lastly, into the Musée Carnavalet, the former home of Mme. Marie de Rabutin-Chantal la Marquise de Sévigné, best know for her prolific, humorous letters to her daughter. I read that at some point she discovered her missives were being copied and published, so she began to compose them accordingly, knowing they would reach a larger audience. You might say Mme. Sévigné was well ahead of her time, or as I now like to think of her, La Mère du Blog.

Et voilà, le video:



Le Marais is, of course, a spectacular neighborhood and as you can see from my modest A/V effort, my apartment is incredibly bright, airy, and comfortable. But as I suspected when I rented it from afar, sight unseen, there are drawbacks to living here. Its inherent picturesque-ness makes this area a major tourist draw, and that combined with it being Paris's primary gay neighborhood make it an extremely expensive place for normal day-to-day activities. The horrifying result of attracting so many TWo-Income-No-Kid tourists is that a simple petit dejeuner of coffee, croissant, and orange juice can cost as much as €13.00 (US$18.00 at today's exchange rate). I have found breakfast available for as low as €8.00 (US$11.00), but that is hardly a bargain, especially if one aspires to become a regular at the nearest caffeine emporium. Shopping is similarly fiscally excruciating, and until the weather turns nasty there is also a preponderance of drunken street revelry each night by tourists and locals alike who come to absorb the $8 beers and $10 cocktails served in Le Marais's numerous watering holes.

The place has quieted down considerably since I arrived last Tuesday, however. My Eurostar train car from London was filled with Scotsmen in skirts and plumed tam-o-shanters and those dead animal thingies they wear over the crotches of their kilts, en route to invade Paris on the occasion of the World Cup rugby finals. As the train emerged from the Chunnel and roared across the Norman landscape famed (among other things) for previous foreign occupations and invasions, one Scot produced a large boom box from among his satchels of haggis and whiskey and suddenly the coach was filled with the sack-of-angry-cats-like screeching of bagpipe music. I was too horrified (and I admit a bit intimidated) to ask them to spare Humanity such an affront, and fortunately the speed with which one can now travel by rail brought us to Paris before I had to break a window and leap to my death and the certain release it would provide me from such aural misery.

The Scots disembarked and marched single file down the platform of the Gare du Nord, chanting auld Scots battle hymns on their way to find a bar to "tak a guid bucket." And many a guid bucket they tuk, filling the streets of Paris with their drunken wailing for the next two days. There wasn't a quartier in the city spared their presence, and their alcohol intake and volume increased exponentially when the Scottish team won their match and overtook the French in the race for the Cup.

You could sense the entire city of Paris -- not just the people, but each and every cafe and cobblestone -- heave a collective sigh of relief when these people finally abandoned France and hauled their drunken kilt-covered feather-tammed rugby-fan asses back to Britain, but although I too was glad to be rid of them I confess that there was one nice thing about their presence here: It may be the only time since we squandered our good will with the French people that Americans, by contrast, seemed quiet, polite, and well-educated.

I don't mean for my first dispatch from France to be so filled with complaint. It really is great to be here, although I realized yesterday that I've been playing an unhealthy sort of game with myself to make the experience most comfortable: When it suits me I pretend I am on vacation (this excuses my spending a fortune for breakfast instead of preparing it at home, and I don't miss my friends as much as I would if I admitted to myself I won't see you all for a very long time), but when it suits me better I pretend I am a permanent resident -- a more relaxing way to bide my time; believing my stay here is unlimited, I don't feel rushed to see the sights all at once or fuss with choices about how I might spend my day.

And then, of course, there's the always entertaining and often embarrassing experience of living in a place where my language skills are horribly wanting. As I've mentioned, the Marais is Paris's gay neighborhood. (As I described it to a friend the other day it is exactly like San Francisco's Castro district if the Castro were clean, cobblestoned, and French. In other words, it is nothing at all like the Castro except for the preponderance of gay bars and bookstores.) On my first night here, having spoken no French in nearly a year save for telling my taxi driver from Gare du Nord the address of my apartment, I was approached by a young man who I believed was trying to sell me an exercise video. It took me quite an embarrassingly long time to realize that he didn't say "Tae-Bo," but "tu es beau," but by the time I figured it out, he was well on his way down the street and I felt I would look REALLY foolish to all the people sitting in the cafe I was standing in front of to shout down the street with my bad French accent, «JE TE COMPRENDS MAINTENANT! MERCI BEAUCOUP, MONSIEUR!!»

When I first came up with this crazy scheme to attempt to live abroad I worried that such a big move, all alone, is much harder when one is 50 than 20, but what I didn't realize is that I don't embarrass as easily in middle age as I did when I was younger -- an unanticipated upside. I've had foreign language brain farts like the one above when I was younger that haunted me for years and still make perspiration bead on my brow when I recall them, but in this case I just found it extremely amusing. So much so that I would find myself laughing out loud to myself whenever I recalled it. The following night I went to a jazz club down the street and I remembered the t'es beau incident just as I happened to be looking at the singer, Gwen Sampé, who was at the bar prior to her performance. (An astounding performance, by the way, and way too hard to describe in a rambling train-of-thought blog entry such as this. I will attempt that at a later date.) When I let out an involuntary, Tourette's-like laugh at myself, it started a conversation with her that continued with her and some of her friends after the show, and now just in the past two days that new friendship has led to my meeting a number of additional people who provide the potential for a new social circle -- something I didn't expect would be so quick to occur.

More news as it develops. I am off to rustle up a pear tart from the patisserie down the street, an addiction to which I knew from past visits I was in danger of succumbing and which, I am ashamed to say, may require professional help to kick. I will let you know if it becomes a problem in need of intervention.

À t'à l'heure

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